


Won't you help me? I'm dying to fall in love

by ApprenticedMagician



Series: Twinyards Appreciation Week [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death, Not Happy, One-Sided Attraction, Other, Starvation, Unrequited Love, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 00:08:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12715713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApprenticedMagician/pseuds/ApprenticedMagician
Summary: They are the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death.The rules are this: those on the lifelist are dying when they shouldn’t be and Aaron should intervene; those on the deathlist are living when they shouldn’t be and Andrew should interfere.The truth is this: angels have as free a will as other creatures do and no angel is more arrogant or willful than Andrew.





	Won't you help me? I'm dying to fall in love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day 3 which was Halloween themed! This is my first shot at writing a horror genre so this is a really special story for me! 
> 
> The premise was largely inspired by a tumblr post I can't find right now; it was a discussion on how horrific healing magic is, the fact that it can erase all injury and force someone to keep fighting.

The first time Andrew asks him to save the life of someone who isn’t meant to be saved, Aaron thinks nothing of it. Sure, sparing Lu Zhong from Andrew’s deathtouch now will mean that she succumbs to postpartum depression and takes a long walk off a short cliff in a few months, but every mother deserves to look her child in the eyes before the End.

It’s one of the few agreements the twins come to without throwing punches.

 

* * *

 

Their type – angels – are always born in sets of two. Brothers and sisters, made in perfect duality, keep the other in check and keep each other on task.

It’s about balance.

And about harmony.

 

* * *

 

The second time Andrew asks, Aaron refuses because he cannot be in two places at once and Cha-O-Ha deserves to live more than Phillip Fontaine does, if only because one man is on Aaron’s lifelist and the other is not. 

Andrew doesn’t begrudge him for his decision because he respects how final it is. If Aaron had wavered or spouted empty platitudes about how he wished he could comply, Andrew would have spent the next millennia giving Aaron the cold shoulder. He might have even scorched away some of Aaron’s silver feathers just like he used to do by “accident” when they were young and small as cherubs.

 

* * *

 

They are the Angel of Life and the Angel of Death.

They aren’t the only ones of course, but they are the only ones who exercise the ability to break the rules set before them.

The rules are this: those on the lifelist are dying when they shouldn’t be and Aaron should intervene; those on the deathlist are living when they shouldn’t be and Andrew should interfere.

The truth is this: angels have as free a will as all other creatures do and no angel is more arrogant or willful than Andrew.

 

* * *

 

The fourteenth time Andrew asks for Aaron’s interference, Aaron goes with haste and with interest because he recognizes the name  _Nathaniel Wesninski_. The same name had appeared on the lifelist some years ago and Aaron had dutifully latched the boy’s soul to the small body shredded apart by asphalt, crouched protectively by his side until other humans arrived to stabilize continued existence without Aaron’s divine powers.

The boy had been no older than thirteen.

Out of curiosity to see how his life had progressed, Aaron agrees to visit Nathaniel in place of Andrew, saving the boy’s soul rather than condemning it.

Nathaniel is fifteen now, with two small wounds bleeding life from his shoulder and abdomen. He is in the back of a speeding and jostling car, wheels running over forested terrain instead of smooth pavement. Unseen, Aaron lays a kiss upon Nathaniel’s fevered forehead and blesses the boy to survive this agony. The tattered edges of Nathaniel’s soul tell him this is one tragedy among many to befall the boy – Aaron’s not sure it will be the last.

Part of him hopes that Andrew’s touch, when it comes, will be a balm and a relief to this tortured soul; Aaron will weep if it is not.

 

* * *

 

“Did you know I’d saved him once before?” Aaron asks when he returns to the silver city.

Andrew looks away from him and says, above his shoulder, “No.”

Aaron believes him because Death never lies.

 _‘And never takes proper care of his wings’_ , Aaron thinks, eyeing the feathers bent out of shape and resists the urge to brush smooth the cream-coloured plumage.

 

* * *

 

 _Mary Hatford_  appears on both Andrew’s list and Aaron’s list. It’s rare but not unheard of – it simply means that somehow Mary had been thrown off the intended path, likely by the trickery of some otherworldly creature, like angels or demons.

They visit her together and realize that angels are to blame - Andrew and Aaron themselves are the ones who had interfered. Mary’s son is Nathaniel Wesninski, the boy Aaron had saved when he wasn’t supposed to. Mother and son are in a car again but it’s parked on a beach instead of speeding through the trees. Mary is bleeding and in peril and the responsibility for deciding the fate of her soul is Andrew and Aaron’s cross to bear.

This doesn’t bother them. These burdens have always been the trade for passing their own judgement.

Aaron decides he is willing to pardon the mother the way he pardoned the son.

“Let me,” he says but before he can move, Andrew reappears by Mary’s side and lunges for her soul with feather-soft hands.

Her skin goes cold when Andrew’s arm breaches her flesh; she breathes her last when his fingers clutch her soul and emptiness replaces what had been the small bit of vitality Aaron could sense from her. He recoils now at the call of empty space, the void which once housed a human soul; her body is nothing but dust and ashes now, nothing divine left within it. It repels him the way all decaying things do.

Andrew has to leave before the soul escapes him and hides itself inside another living thing – tree or bird or star.

“Let this be the last of it,” Andrew says before he goes, not looking to see if Aaron will follow.

Aaron stays a moment to watch Nathaniel Wesninski. The boy looks to the sky for a long minute and Aaron would think he was following Andrew’s flight if he didn’t know better. (Only those who have died and come back have the ability to see Death’s angels and Aaron has worked vigilantly to keep Nathaniel from dying even once.) Once he snaps out of it, Nathaniel’s body works to set fire to the car and corpse but his soul is crying out, repelled by the same void that Aaron senses.

Dust and ashes and soot.

Nathaniel’s soul has a new tear in it.

“Yes,” Aaron mutters, watching Nathaniel watch the flames and hoping his words carry the blessing he means them to, “let this be the last of it.”

 

* * *

 

The fifteenth time,  _Nathaniel Wesninski_.

The sixteenth time,  _Nathaniel Wesninski_.

The seventeenth time,  _Nathaniel Wesninski_.

“You can’t keep him just because he’s pretty,” Aaron chides.

Andrew scorches some feathers and Aaron feels his suspicions solidify.

 

* * *

 

The Angel of Life cannot take a life.

The Angel of Death can stubbornly refuse to deliver death.

The outcome is a soul and body in perpetual agony. A life-long limbo drawn out in real time.

Aaron doesn’t have the heart to put Nathaniel’s soul through more than it’s already been through. It’s not in his nature. So he doesn’t refuse. Not the eighteenth, or nineteenth, or twentieth time.

Death’s love is not a gift.

Life’s pity is not a gift.

Nathaniel Wesninski continues to receive both.

 

* * *

 

Andrew begins starting fights.

Renee, a fellow Angel of Death, has noticed the cries for absolution from a soul strained too far. Andrew won’t let her near enough to see it, but it doesn’t matter; now that she’s making efforts to attune herself, she can feel the wreckage as if she were holding the soul in her own hands.

“He needs Rest, Andrew,” she pleads, beaten and bruised and braver than Aaron has been.

“He deserves Life,” Andrew insists, sharp and righteous and angry, fists bashing Renee anywhere he can reach and cracking her feathers made of glass.

“Peace doesn’t exist for him there,” she tries again, wings spasming under Andrew’s blows, casting small shivering rainbows of light. This is the first time she’s diverted from her own deathlist and Renee is the most perfect of all the angels. For her to exercise divine intervention… Andrew  _must_ understand how overdue Nathaniel’s End is.

“He is  **one**  soul!” screams Allison, Renee’s twin and opposite; Aaron’s double. “Just like all the others! How many souls have you traded for his one?! How many lives?!”

Aaron knows that every time Andrew asks him to save Nathaniel, another soul is traded off instead. Balance and harmony. Each favour of life requires an exchange of death.

Nathaniel has been saved no less than seven times.

No less than seven souls have been traded for his one tattered soul, his one impossible life.

All souls are equal but all lives are not. The names on the lifelist are merely lives that Someone wants to see continue. The names on the deathlist are lives that no one wants to see continue.

No one wants to see the path of Nathaniel’s life continue, not even Nathaniel himself if he’s appearing on Andrew’s list. And yet…

Each time Andrew asks for Nathaniel’s life, Aaron cannot help but immediately attend to him, no matter the circumstance of his own lifelist. Nathaniel’s only moments of peace are the few Aaron can give him, cradled in gentle arms with soft lips to his hair. To do any less would be to abandon Nathaniel to that horrible limbo of death without release. And Aaron cannot bear the thought of that condemnation.

(He knows by now that living is just a different kind of sentence.)

 

* * *

 

Andrew watches Aaron work from afar, tries his best to learn how Aaron does what he does, to anchor a soul and soothe the hurt, to keep them tethered to life instead of stealing them away to death.

Andrew tries to imitate it - the kiss of life, the guardian’s post - as best he can when Aaron isn’t looking.

He’s tried it no less than seven times.

He’s failed every time; his lips only bring silent destruction, a quiet death the length of a whimper. It’s a venom he can’t purge, and Andrew begins to despise Aaron who can kiss a beautiful boy and not ruin him.

 

* * *

 

There is one time when Andrew doesn’t ask.

Instead he just grabs Aaron and  _yanks_  them down to Earth and Aaron tries to choke down his horror because  _he can’t be seeing this_. Nathaniel is barely twenty years old and he’s chained flat on a stone floor six feet below earth and about to lose the use of his legs forever and Aaron swiftly gathers him in his arms and shields them both with his wings and  _prays_  to become substantial  _just this once_  to keep Nathaniel from seeing Andrew violently reap the soul of a madman and crush it between his fingers.

He needn’t have bothered; Nathaniel’s eyes are swollen shut and as a human he can’t see angels anyway.

Nathan Wesninski becomes the eighth soul traded for Nathaniel’s life.

The corpse collapses to the ground, organs shredded as violently as his soul, which is now a collection of spores that scatter and burn and flee from Andrew’s rage. It’s one soul he won’t be chasing; Andrew is happy to leave it in an existence that is both afraid and unwhole.

Aaron feels Nathaniel shake and rattle with sobs of terror and he cannot understand why Andrew is condemning this beautiful soul to live the same existence.

“Please,” Aaron begs, tears leaking in time with Nathaniel’s, so familiar is he with this boy. “Let this be the End of it.”

Andrew’s fists clench and his wings twitch. Nathaniel is also crying ‘please’, babbling nonsense and trying to bargain for his life from a man he doesn’t yet realize is already dead. His skin is peeled and raw - not just around the cuffs, his face and torso too - there’s blood in his teeth that he keeps choking on, spraying it across his clothes and face; there’s dirt on his front and splinters in his stomach; he’d been dragged by his feet across the ground and down the wooden stairs to where he is now - the boy's nails are torn and his blood paints a trail down the stairway. Every single iota of Nathaniel is screaming in pain and pulled taut from panic.

Aaron knows Andrew must sense it all too.

But Andrew bites his lip and simply says, “Not the End. Not yet.”

Nathaniel flinches in his arms, cries anew, and begins his senseless pleading again.

“Andrew,” Aaron insists, driven so far past the point of desperation, “he needs to be saved. Save him!”

Andrew is quiet for a minute, golden eyes like Aaron's own flickering to Nathaniel’s pathetic form. Then he says, “I will save him. Just not like that.”

His refusal in the face of Nathaniel’s ultimate suffering is a stake in Aaron’s heart and he despises the fact he cannot save Nathaniel the way he needs to be saved. He kisses this boy and kisses this boy, and tries to reach deep into that broken soul to heal whatever crevices can be healed.

He knows it’s not enough.

He also knows every kiss he bestows on Nathaniel is a blade Andrew will one day pierce into his back.

This is why no other angels break the rules.

(This is why no other angels fall in love.)

 

* * *

 

The angels stay with Nathaniel until he is found by humans who will help him.

It is thirty-six hours before someone opens the door to the basement, but she’s there to help Nathan, not Nathaniel, so Andrew scatters her soul the same way as before.

It is another thirty-six hours before a neighbour checks in and calls the police when they find Lola’s body.

When the police arrive, Nathaniel is unconscious from dehydration, still chained to the floor, and every wound is festered with infection. They don’t even realize he’s still breathing at first.

If it hadn’t been for Aaron, he wouldn’t be.

Aaron follows Nathaniel to the hospital alone, an angel divine with the Power of Life, powerless to do anything but watch and wait.  

 

* * *

 

It’s called ‘falling in love’ and though the love part is questionable, the falling part is not.

Aaron watches Andrew’s wings worsen as time passes; their beautiful cream colour is beginning to brown on the edges, like the inside of a bitten apple; the bent feathers won’t straighten, no matter how either brother paws at them; his flights begin to leave a faint trail of molten feathers everywhere he goes. Andrew travels a lot now that he’s “saving” Nathaniel like Aaron beseeched him to.

Andrew’s deathlist gets longer by the day but he ignores his duties to spend time at Nathaniel’s side. Andrew’s beginning to be less discerning when it comes to the people surrounding his chosen soul - anyone remotely dangerous begins dying left and right around this boy. Aaron cannot tell if this is saving him or scarring him even further.

With Andrew racking up a death toll with his vendetta, Aaron is forced to pick up the slack and trade those deaths for lives. This is who he saves: a dog belonging to David Wymack, a patient of Abigail Winfield’s, a sister of Danielle Wilds, an alley cat, Randy Boyd, Matt Boyd. If anyone accuses him that all his saved souls are ones that ease Nathaniel’s forced existence, he cannot and will not defend himself. It’s Aaron’s latest attempt to soothe what pain he can; each life saved is one that exposes the most sensitive nerve of his aching bleeding heart.

It’s called ‘falling in love’ and though the falling part is questionable, the love part is not.

 

* * *

 

“It hurts,” Aaron tells them while rubbing at his chest.

“Yeah, well,” Allison bites, uncompassionate, “that’s life.”

She’s still furious that Andrew’s last attack cost Renee her beauty - most of her feathers are cracked now, some outright shattered and absent. The rainbows they cast are both smaller and more chaotic than before.

(The feathers Andrew destroys don’t grow back anymore. Now when he fights other angels he scars them, the way only demons are known to do.)

“It’s also love,” Renee offers, a little more sympathetic to Aaron’s problem.

He cups the most fragile of her feathers, watches reverently as they cut his fingers and distort his reflection. He sees that his silver wings are as cracked and tarnished and broken as hers and knows the distortion of her scars isn’t responsible for everything he sees.

For an angel, it isn’t called ‘falling in love’.

It’s called ‘dying’.

 

* * *

 

It’s the twenty-third time Andrew has asked Aaron to save a life that is not on his lifelist but this time Aaron is refusing, even though every instinct in him tugs toward the comatose boy that he loves (by proxy or maybe by choice).

Nathaniel will not wake up. Not without Aaron’s kiss.

Andrew nods, says, “Alright then,” and reappears behind the nurse reading Nathaniel’s vitals and Aaron  _cannot_  let Andrew kill another person out of order.

Anyone who dies before Nathaniel now is dying out of order.

Aaron shouts and he leaps and he grips Andrew’s torso tight in a way he’s never done before and Andrew’s telling him to let go but he won’t and that’s when everything  **ignites**.

Aaron  _screams_ as he is ripped apart and it is hellfire, he knows, the touch of something unholy, the opposite of pure. This is the vat of poison he has let fester deep inside his brother’s belly; it is finally recompense for every kiss Andrew asked him to give Nathaniel in his place.

It is still nothing compared to the hell Aaron knows they have forced Nathaniel through. So he screams and he screams but he bears it and he doesn’t cry for absolution.

When it’s finally over, Aaron falls to blackened knees, his hands have burned away to stumps and his wings have melted from his back. He’s blind from the fire. His throat has shrunk and the only triumphant thought he can have through all this overwhelming distress is, ‘ _I can’t save him now_.’

Balance and harmony.

Aaron is dying and Andrew is not an Angel of Life. He cannot use Aaron’s death to wake Nathaniel. He also cannot kill the nurse to try and force a balance to be made, because Aaron can hear two wings worth of feathers drop to the tiled floor.

Andrew will Fall and lose his powers for killing his brother and that will mean he cannot kill out of order any longer.

Nathaniel will die the next time he appears on some angel’s deathlist. He will get the Peace and Rest Aaron wants so desperately for him.

Aaron, the Angel of Life, Falls and then Dies for Nathaniel Wesninski.

Andrew, the Angel of Death, falls and then Falls for Nathaniel Wesninski.

And it couldn’t be under more painful circumstances.

**Author's Note:**

> Yikes, right?  
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
